David
Irving was accused of being a racist zealot who, by
denying the Holocaust, had manipulated history. Yesterday he
lost the libel action brought to clear his name. Has he
changed his mind?

Interview by Michael
Horsnell

False witness

THE watercolour on the wall behind
David Irving's desk is not, as some detractors claim,
Adolf Hitler's self-portrait. Irving does own that picture;
it was given to him by Christa Schroeder, the
Führer's private secretary, who had taken it for
safe-keeping at the end of the war. But he has it locked
away in a glass case.

Instead,
the unframed portrait is of Franklin D. Roosevelt,
the avuncular American president. More interesting is the
signed photograph of Churchill, whom Irving has
condemned as a drunken warmonger, that hangs in the passage
and bears the inscription: "Your friendship has been a very
great privilege to me." When I remark on it, Irving smiles
and raises his bushy eyebrows in a manner curiously
reminiscent of Rudolf Hess. "Bought it at auction,"
he says.

Irving
is the maverick historian who sees Hitler as "no greater
incarnation of evil" than the Allied leaders. He has just
spent two months pursuing a libel
case in the High Court against the American author
Professor Deborah Lipstadt and her publishers,
Penguin. The action centred on Lipstadt's assertion in her
latest book, Denying the Holocaust:
the Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, that Irving
was one of the world's most prominent and dangerous
"Holocaust deniers".

Yesterday Mr Justice Gray came down on the side of
Lipstadt. Losing will cost Irving dear; though he conducted
his own case in court, he has still incurred costs put at
£2.5 million. His imposing mansion flat in Mayfair -
where he has lived for 32 years and which he shares with his
Danish girlfriend Bente, 35, and their daughter
Jessica, (right), six -- may have to be sold.

"The consequences of losing should worry me a
lot more, but you get to the position where you insulate
yourself," he says. "I don't allow it to keep me awake. I
have taken no steps whatever, like putting things in my
partner's name. No smart accountants have been hired to
hide funds away. There are no other significant assets;
my assets are my intellectual properties. If disaster
strikes, it's true disaster.

"I have no doubt [the defendants] would drive
me to bankruptcy. But there would be some consolation. I
was growing tired of living in Mayfair anyway."

Irving, 62, the author of 30 books, professes to have
lost £200,000 a year for the past three years through
not writing a line while concentrating on his litigation.
But he is believed to have raised up to $500,000 on his
fighting fund
website, where he describes Lipstadt as "the golden-tipped
spearhead of the enemies of truth". Irving supporters from
America, Germany and Scandinavia have provided individual
donations ranging from $5 to $50,000. Unsurprisingly, he
wishes to keep the identity of his benefactors secret.

During the High Court case, Richard Rampton, QC,
the counsel for Lipstadt and Penguin Books, cited many
examples of Irving's zealotry. They included his attempts to
pervert the mind of his baby daughter with a racist ditty
while walking her in her pram, and a quote from an Irving
speech, delivered in Calgary, Canada, in September 1991, in
which he asserted

"more women died in the back seat of Edward
Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a
gas chamber at Auschwitz".

By being so overtly anti-Semitic, Irving had, Rampton
said, prostituted his calling as an historian.

But
Irving, as always, is unrepentant. He claims that at the
outset of the case he offered
to settle if the defendants paid £500 to charity in
memory of his late daughter Josephine, (left) one of
his four daughters by his Spanish wife Pilar (the
couple divorced in 1981), who died last year aged 34 .

"They rejected it," he says. "They wanted a
scrap, so I gave them one. I had to take action. I don't
find it hurtful being called all sorts of names. But the
campaign against me had reached such intensity that I
could no longer ignore it. It would have destroyed my
livelihood."

Despite having been the one who pursued the libel case,
he sees himself as the victim. The reading of extracts from
his diaries by the defence counsel, he says, made him feel
"violated".

"You keep a diary for your personal use. When my
daughter died I reread the entries I made about her when
she was one and two. It was very distressing. Now they
are public property.

"But I am no fool. I realised as soon as I went into
the witness box that they would have a field day with me.
I have no regrets. It's been the most exhausting phase of
my life but I put up a pretty decent fight."

As a dedicated exponent of revisionism, Irving remains
defiant in his assertion that Hitler
knew nothing of a Final Solution, in which up to six
million Jews died. He purports the Holocaust to be a myth
deployed by Jews in order to blackmail
the German people into paying vast sums in
reparations.

At his feet is what he calls the "holy of holies", an
enlarged aerial photograph of crematorium No 2 at Birkenau.
There is, he contends, no evidence
of the manholes through which survivors say the deadly
gas pellets were inserted. As he points to the picture, he
spits out the words: "The so-called factory of death!"

His
beliefs may be considered by many to be outrageously
distasteful, but they are not new. In 1970, he faced a bill
of £70,000 in damages and costs for reinventing history
in his book The Destruction of Convoy PQ17. He had
libelled the
convoy commander, Captain John Broome, by wrongly
blaming him for its destruction by German aircraft and
U-boats. At an unsuccessful appeal before Lord
Denning, Master of the Rolls, and Lord Justice
Phillimore in 1971 Irving was described as a "grasping,
conceited and foolish young man".

His empathy with all things German had been evident from
his first book, The
Destruction of Dresden, published in 1963, written
after he had spent a year as a steelworker in the Ruhr for
Thyssen. Already a Germanophile, he listened intently to a
fellow worker who told him of the Allied air raids, then
began his research.

Rampton,
who read the book in preparation for his client's libel
defence, says Irving had exaggerated the number of deaths in
the Allied bombing of Dresden (right) by tenfold -- 250,000
fatalities, instead of the official estimates of 25,000 --
to make a "false equivalence" between the victims and the
number of Jews killed at Auschwitz. The Dresden book
predicated Irving's career, giving him an entrée to
Hitler's inner circle. From those who had survived, and the
widows of those who had not, he was to acquire a wealth of
documents and accounts that put him head and shoulders above
his peers as a researcher of the Third Reich's history.

But by sanitising the Nazis and absolving Hitler of
genocide, Irving's stance has led to clashes and
controversy. Over the years, demonstrators have paraded
placards outside his home demanding "Gas Irving"; he has
been assaulted in a restaurant; and when his daughter
Jessica
was a baby, he says he had to keep a Moses basket handy by a
window in order to lower her by rope to ground level in the
event of his apartment being stormed.

Irving is the son of a Royal
Navy commander who served at the Battle of Jutland in
1916 (below) and on Arctic convoys during World War Two. But
his parents separated when he was young; John Irving was
reunited with his son only in the last two years of his
life, from 1965 to 1967, when David was in his late
twenties.

The
young David was raised by his mother, a commercial artist
who had studied at the Slade School of Art, and who was
forced, because of the breakdown of her marriage, to bring
up her four children in much-reduced circumstances. Irving
has a twin, Nicholas, a civil servant, who announced
their estrangement in 1992. The family originated from
Portsmouth: Irving's earliest memories include cheering with
the crowds as the troopships left for Normandy in 1944.
Later he became a pupil at Sir Anthony Browne's, a grammar
school in Brentwood, Essex, where he achieved notoriety by
choosing a copy of Mein Kampf
as a school prize, not because he wanted the book, he says,
but because he wanted to shock.

He gained 13 O levels, and eight A levels. But despite
embarking upon two degrees -- the first at Imperial College
London, where he read physics, and the second at University
College London, where he took economics -- he dropped out of
both courses and failed to graduate.

From his earliest student days he was politically active.
At Imperial he joined the Young Conservatives and edited
Phoenix, the college magazine founded by H.G. Wells. In
1959, his final year there, he also edited the college's
Carnival Times, causing a stink when he engineered it to
incur costs that cancelled out the profits of that year's
carnival after learning that the proceeds were destined for
a South African subversive organisation. At University
College, in 1962, he spoke with Oswald Mosley in
support of the motion "This House would restrict
Commonwealth immigration".

His reputation, as a writer as well as an activist, was
already gaining him enemies. In 1964, two Jews -- Manny
Carpel, then 20, and Gerald
Gable, then 26 -- posing as GPO engineers were fined
after breaking into
his flat. They believed he was a fascist and had hoped
to find political material that they could take to Special
Branch. Gable, who later became the publisher of the
anti-fascist magazine Searchlight, remained a lifelong
adversary.

After publication in 1991 of the expanded edition of
Hitler's
War, Irving says,

"it became evident that publishers around the
country had pressure put on them directly or indirectly
not to publish me".

Undeniably, he has been ostracised by the publishing
world; houses such as Macmillan
in London and St
Martin's Press in New York were not about to ignore
protests from Jewish groups about his "repellent" views.

He blames his exile on a "global endeavour" by his most
powerful enemies: the Anti-Defamation
League in the US, the Board
of Deputies of British Jews, the Jewish Defence League,
and the Simon
Wiesenthal Centre, which, he says, have established an
"international campaign to destroy my legitimacy". He sees
Lipstadt as an ambassador of what he deems the international
Jewish conspiracy against him.

Irving has been banned from a host of nations, including
Germany,
which is seeking his extradition
on charges of racial incitement over a lecture
he gave to the right-wing NPD at Weinheim. He says his
exclusion has denied him access to precious Third Reich
archives on which much of his research depends.

But he is nothing if not tenacious. In 1990 he launched
his own imprint, Focal Point Publications. With his libel
case over, he says he is now editing Vol
2 of his Churchill biography, Triumph in Adversity, and
is working on a biography of Heinrich Himmler, based
on access he was given in America to 200 letters the SS
chief wrote to his mistress.

"I have all the material I need, though being
barred from the German archives is a serious matter," he
says. "There's a lot of material like this in American
homes. US troops captured Himmler's house, looted it and
carried trophies home. I want to get into Himmler's
mentality rather than the history of the SS."

Irving talks enthusiastically about the "astonishingly
good economics" of publishing his own books, an enterprise
that involves driving a truck to hundreds of bookshops
around the country hawking his work. "I get the author's
cut, the publisher's cut and the distributor's cut," he says
with relish.

He also sells his
books via the Internet, though he mutters about an
"Orwellian exercise" by some bodies to filter out his
website. "They are trying to stop me expressing an opinion,"
he says. "My case against Lipstadt has been about free
speech."

He is disappointed that Lipstadt did not take the stand
during the case, denying him the chance to cross-examine
her.

"I'd have asked about her racism, though I'm
sure the judge would have intervened. She has written
several articles about the importance of Jews marrying
only Jews. That's racist. It's the hypocrisy that annoys
me.

"She is on record as saying she would never debate
with revisionists, but it came as a surprise when she did
not give evidence. I accuse her of a lack of
courage."

Ask Irving if he accepts he is a racist and he
replies:

"The scumbags say I am but I have had the most
terrific blacks, Pakistanis, you name them, working for
me, and I haven't seen one working on all the benches
occupied by Lipstadt's team in court."

His response to accusations of anti-Semitism is equally
well versed. "If I were a Jew, I should be far more
concerned not at who pulled the trigger, but why.
Anti-Semitism is a recurring malaise. There must be some
reason why anti-Semitic groups break out like some kind of
epidemic."

The next step in his crusade may be another libel case,
against the writer Gitta Sereny over an article she
wrote about obssession -- even though she is gracious enough
to acknowledge, amid her contempt for his revisionism, that
he is a "man of talent, both as a researcher and a
writer".

Certainly Irving's greatest accomplishment is that he was
the first historian to warn, in 1983, that The Hitler
Diaries were fakes. Lord Dacre, who, as Professor Hugh
Trevor-Roper, originally authenticated the "diaries",
says of him:

"I regard Irving as a very industrious and
efficient investigator, and hunter of documents, a hard
worker and good writer. That is on the credit side.

"But I don't regard him as an historian. I don't think
he has any historical sense. He is a propagandist who
uses efficiently collected and arranged material to
support a propagandist line."

Richard
Evans, Professor of Modern History at Cambridge,
(right) adds: "He has fallen so far short of the standards
of scholarship customary among historians that he does not
deserve to be called an historian at all."

If his peers' views are any sort of template, Irving will
be remembered as a pariah, a dangerous falsifier of the
blackest chapter in 20th-century history and, ultimately, a
man whose veracity could not be trusted.

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